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China has made significant progress increasing access to tap water and sanitation services, and has sharply reduced the burden of waterborne and water-related infectious diseases over the past two decades. However, in a study published in the latest edition of Nature Climate Change, researchers from Emory University found that climate change will blunt China’s efforts at further reducing these diseases in the decades to come.

Climate change is expected to disrupt ecosystems by changing the life cycles of insects and other organisms in unpredictable ways – and scientists are getting a preview of these changes in cities. Research from North Carolina State University shows that some insect pests are thriving in warm, urban environments and developing earlier, limiting the impact of parasitoid wasps that normally help keep those pest populations in check.

On a quest to design an alternative to the two complex approaches currently used to produce electrons within microwave electron guns, a team of researchers from Euclid TechLabs and Argonne National Laboratory’s Center for Nanoscale Materials have demonstrated a plug-and-play solution capable of operating in this high-electric-field environment with a high-quality electron beam.

Like hedonistic rock stars that live by the “better to burn out than to fade away” credo, certain galaxies flame out in a blaze of glory. Astronomers have struggled to grasp why these young “starburst” galaxies—ones that are very rapidly forming new stars from cold molecular hydrogen gas up to 100 times faster than our own Milky Way—would shut down their prodigious star formation to join a category scientists call “red and dead.”

Many published microbiome studies are likely to have been contaminated and may incorrectly report the presence of microorganisms unintentionally introduced from the laboratory environment, says a study published in the open access journal BMC Biology. The findings could explain why unexpected bacteria have been previously identified in clinical samples and suggests that studies may have prematurely proposed links to disease.

Regardless of whether a business has been in the family for one year or one thousand, the person in charge typically hopes that handing the reins to a close relative will ensure security for future generations. But that’s easier said than done, given that 30 per cent of firms make it to the second generation of family ownership, and only 12 per cent make it to the third.

The study, led by researchers from the University of Western Sydney’s Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, along with researchers from the Australian National University, the University of Tasmania and James Cook University in Queensland, looked at the behaviour of common brushtail possums from a population in North Queensland that was exposed to high rates of predation by carpet pythons.

An international team of bioengineers has boosted the ability of bacteria to produce isopentenol, a compound with desirable gasoline properties. The finding, published in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, is a significant step toward developing a bacterial strain that can yield industrial quantities of renewable bio-gasoline.

Many pollutants with the potential to meddle with hormones—with bisphenol A (BPA) as a prime example—are already common in the environment. In an effort to clean up these pollutants found in the soil and waterways, scientists are now reporting a novel way to break them down by recruiting help from nanoparticles and light